The GNOME project has classified the Clutter graphics library as an obsolete project, the development of which has been halted. Starting with GNOME 42, the Clutter library and its related components Cogl, Clutter-GTK, and Clutter-GStreamer will be removed from the GNOME SDK, and the associated code will be moved to archived repositories.
To ensure compatibility with existing extensions, internal copies of Cogl and Clutter will remain within GNOME Shell and will continue to be provided in the foreseeable future. Application developers using GTK3 alongside Clutter, Clutter-GTK, or Clutter-GStreamer are advised to migrate their applications to GTK4, libadwaita, and GStreamer. If this is not possible, Cogl, Clutter, Clutter-GTK, and Clutter-GStreamer should be added separately as dependencies to Flatpak packages, as they will be excluded from the main GNOME runtime.
The Clutter project has long been stagnant and has not been actively developed — the last significant release, 1.26, was made in 2016, and the last patch update was proposed at the beginning of 2020. The functionalities and ideas developed in Clutter are now provided by the GTK4 framework, libadwaita, GNOME Shell, and composite Mutter. proxy server Mutter.
It is worth noting that the Clutter library is focused on rendering user interfaces. Its features are geared towards active use of animation and visual effects, allowing for the application of methods used in game development when creating regular GUI applications. The library itself resembles a game engine, with as many operations offloaded to the GPU as possible, requiring minimal code to create a complex user interface. The library was primarily used with OpenGL but can also operate on top of GLib, GObject, GLX, SDL, WGL, Quartz, EGL, and Pango. There are bindings for Perl, Python, C#, C++, Vala, and Ruby.
Source: opennet.ru
